The Collective Commentary as Reference Genre

Abstract

The commentary has long been a particularly versatile genre. The continuous commentary on a text is the most widespread and long-lived model, generating ancient scholia, medieval manuscripts displaying a central island of text in a sea of commentary, and innumerable commentaries from the Renaissance to the present, of classical and biblical texts as well as more recent ones. Less well-studied is an alternative type of commentary, with roots in antiquity but no medieval instantiation, in which selected passages from different authors are the object of discussion, with or without an attempt at a systematic order. This kind of commentary constitutes an identifiable sub-genre in the Renaissance, with a range of titles frequently involving "commentarii" or "variae lectiones." These commentaries can be called collective in that they gather observations on terms and passages from many different works of ancient literature, including fragments sometimes not attested elsewhere. The genre was revived by Italian humanists on ancient models, particularly that of Aulus Gellius. It was characteristically motivated by philological questions and used as a vehicle for proposing emendations or discussing proper Latin usage (at times to polemical effect), but the genre was also open to encyclopedic, contextual or explicitly digressive material.